Another series where I like the two lead characters John and Nora Stevenson.
Excerpt from Abigail by Malcolm MacDonald
In this clip, the two main characters make up after years living apart though still married.
John turned from Nora to face the lake. She saw how white his knuckles were from their fierce grip upon the iron balustrade. Suddenly she could wait no more for him to take the initiative. She was in hell until he did. “Well, John,” she said, “and shall you now forsake your canvas bed?”
Still he did not turn. When he spoke, his voice was strangely altered by the power of his emotion. “I’d easier climb yon mountains than say what must be said.”
He slumped. “Eay, Nora! She’s fifty years old!”
He snorted. “You’re twenty compared with her.” Silence returned.
“Is that all you’ve got to say?” she asked.“
But what good am I? I blighted your life and I ruined hers. How can I ever make that up to either of you?” “Well, not by prolonging the offence, that’s certain.”
He turned to her then, clumsily, and took her in his arms—though he leaned so heavily he would have fallen if she had not been there. His kiss, which she had not felt for so long, was exactly as her body remembered it. The Bitch had taught him no new tricks, then. She felt twenty again, as he had joked. She craved him with all the intensity she had so long fought to suppress. Now unbound, it consumed her, became the be-all of her. Nothing else mattered. There was nothing else to matter. “Come on,” she said, pulling him toward their bedroom. For a moment he resisted.
“But I’m near seventy,” he said.
“And you’re…” “I’m twenty. You may be what you please but if I’m to bear the weight of you, I’ll choose the manner of it.”
They were older, of course; their skin was less supple, their muscles slower, they were more careful of their joints—but these were trifling changes. From the moment he pulled the bedclothes back over them and straddled her, seeking the old positions, she knew how much they still belonged to each other. And the knowledge made her as good as twenty—and him as good as thirty-two.
An hour later he cleared his throat and said, “We must get up.”
“Just once more,” she wheedled. Twenty minutes later she asked, “Where did all that ‘hush of life’ go then?”
“I must have left it in Saint John’s Wood. There’s been an epidemic of it there!” After a silence he went on. “We must talk about…arrangements and things.”
“What did you mean, John, saying ‘she’s fifty’ like that?” “Like what?”
“The way you said it. You know the way you said it.”
“I meant where’s the harm in it now?”
Nora laughed. “Well, now you know!”
“Eay, Nora! We’ve not done this for…she and I…for…I don’t know. It can’t be as long as ten years, but it feels like it.”
“Listen, John.” She was serious now. “If you live to be a hundred, I shall be eighty-nine. And if on your hundredth birthday I hear you so much as passed the time of day with her, I’ll blind you with these fingernails.”
“But the lads are all grown up and gone,” John said. “She’s alone.”
“What fifty-year-old mistress isn’t! All right, John. I’ll accept that your continued interest is kindness of heart, not lust…”
“Oh? What was it then brought you and her to bed?”
“Nay, love—no recriminations. It doesn’t matter now. It doesn’t matter if it was lust or…or a common fear of spiders. You were in the middle of accepting the fact that I have a kind heart.”
“Aye. So I’ll say this—because I’ll match kindness with kindness. You may see her to settle what affairs you have to settle, and you may then see her but once more: when you give her away on her wedding day.”
“Wedding?” He was astonished.
“If we can’t find her a nice settled widower who’d rather have the company of a wife than a housekeeper, the world has changed too much. Especially a wife with a pension.” She chuckled. “A small pension, of course. You’d not want to attract gold seekers.”
“Well…” he said uncertainly, but could find no obvious flaw.
She grinned and kissed him. “Of course you never thought of it,” she teased. “You’re the dog with three beef shinbones and but two jaws!” She tried to excite him again.
“Eay, no, Nora love. It hurts, it truly does.”
“Goo-o-d!” she whispered.
